James Cook was a highly decorated high school state and national champion wrestler at Madera High. Many top college programs vied for his services and it seemed he had it made accepting a full-ride scholarship to American University in Washington, D.C.

James Cook was exactly where he wanted to be.

That is until he arrived at American in the fall of 2010. His coach had botched the amount of scholarship money he had to allocate and never even informed Cook, who arrived to find out that his $50,000 scholarship had been reduced to a mere $5,000.